As scholar Elaine H. Kim points out, Chin's metaphors for the community include "bugs, spiders, frogs, [...] a funeral parlor, and obsolete carnival, or a pathetic minstrel show.

Chin relishes the freedom celebrated in legends of the Old West, represented by the railroads that he references in the title of the collection, which were built with the help of Chinese immigrants who would never themselves be able to ride them.

The narrator longs for the free motion of birds' flight but also finds himself pondering death by falling as a way to escape the life of constant riding.

[3] Scholar Rachel Lee has examined one story in which Chin examines the young/old conflict from the perspective of the older generation: "The Only Real Day," which focuses on Yuen, an immigrant who has fallen out of contact with this family back in Hong Kong and now works as a dishwasher in Oakland for a woman he finds too assimilated to American culture; his only contact with his friends comes once a week when he meets them in San Francisco for gambling night.

Yuen despairs about the state of the world, lamenting that there is little chance of new heroes arising in the same manner of those recounted in the classic Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh.

Yuen attempts suicide, but ends up dying in the bath; Lee considers that Chin has deliberately created "a prolonged, Hamlet-like contemplation of one's lack of action" that also reveals the legacy of U.S. legal discrimination against Asians.